A Crime of Passion

by Scott Pratt

  And then it was my turn. I was uneasy for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that my client was on trial for his life, or at least a significant part of it, and it was up to me to spin things in such a manner that the people sitting in the jury box would let him go home. They may not like him, they may not believe him, but I had to make them like me well enough that they would believe I would not lie to them, would not try to mislead them, and would not represent a man who was guilty. It was a slippery slope, one that I’d walked many times. If I lost my footing, I’d go sliding out of sight into oblivion, dragging my client, whom I still believed to be innocent of murder, along with me. And if that happened, even though I would eventually be able to crawl out of the abyss and return home to my life and my loved ones, Paul Milius would go directly to jail for a long, long time.

  I approached the jury box, smiled, nodded deferentially, and began.

  “This is one of those rare cases where the proof can be misleading,” I said, “because almost everything that Mr. Frye said is true. My client, Paul Milius, one of the most respected men in the entertainment industry and a man who has never, ever been accused of any sort of crime prior to this, did go to Kasey Cartwright’s room that evening. The proof will show that he went there to make up with her, to apologize for the misunderstanding they’d had earlier in the evening that culminated in Miss Cartwright tossing a glass of tea in Mr. Milius’s face. But when Mr. Milius got to the room, Miss Cartwright was still angry, and she said something so hurtful that it caused Mr. Milius to slap her. Mr. Milius will tell you what she said when he testifies later in the trial. He regretted hitting her immediately and attempted to apologize, but Miss Cartwright ran into a bathroom and locked the door. Mr. Milius left immediately.

  “The timeline, which is extremely important, is this: The hotel’s surveillance tape will show that Mr. Milius entered through the lobby at two thirteen and entered the elevator on the first floor at two fifteen. The elevator took him directly to the thirty-first floor where he got off at two sixteen. There are no cameras outside the elevators on the individual floors, but we do know that Mr. Milius reentered the same elevator at two twenty-one and was out the front door of the hotel by two twenty-four. He was in the hotel for a grand total of eleven minutes. He called the Volunteer Cab Company at two twenty-five and was in a cab three minutes later.

  “So if he killed her, he did it quickly, almost instantaneously. It would have had to have been premeditated, yet he isn’t charged with first-degree murder. One can only speculate why. Perhaps the prosecution doesn’t believe in its own case.

  “Beyond this uncertainty, you will have to ask yourselves why a successful businessman with no criminal record would suddenly and without explanation murder a young lady who was making his record company tens of millions of dollars each year and who would have made much, much more in the years to come. Paul Milius had turned Kasey Cartwright into a star. He had discovered her and had provided her with access to some of the best people in the country music business. I’m talking about producers, sound engineers, musicians, backup singers, arrangers, songwriters, marketing people. You name it, Kasey had the best. If you look at the trends in the sales of her music, everything was up, up, up. No plateaus, no drops. There were nothing but good things in store for her.

  “So the question becomes: If Paul Milius killed Kasey Cartwright, why did he do it? Our proof will show that he didn’t kill her because he had no reason to kill her. You’ll hear the prosecution say—in their closing argument, I’m sure—that they are not required to prove motive. That’s true. Under the law, they’re not required to prove motive. But in the court of common sense, people want to know why someone was killed, and in a case like this, there is no more important question.

  “In the end, after you’ve heard all the witnesses and reviewed all the documents, after you’ve listened to what Mr. Frye has to say and what I have to say, there will be far more than a reasonable doubt in your minds as to whether Paul Milius committed this crime. There will be a mountain of doubt, and because of that, you will be required by law and by duty to find him not guilty.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Judge Graves looked a bit hung over, but he seemed mentally sharp. He looked at Pennington Frye and said, “Is the prosecution ready?”

  “Yes,” Frye said.

  The judge turned to me. “Is the defense ready?”

  “We are.”

  Back to Frye: “Call your first witness.”

  Frye stood. “The state calls Maria Ortero.”

  A door at the back of the courtroom opened, and a young, slim, Mexican woman whose shoulders stooped slightly walked in. She was wearing black pants and a pink blouse, and she kept her eyes on the floor as she took short, quick steps down the center aisle of the packed but silent courtroom. She reached the witness stand, sat down, and the judge swore her in.

  “Would you state your name please, ma’am?” Frye said.

  “Maria Ortero.”

  “And where do you live, Ms. Ortero?”

  “Here in Nashville, at 2250 North Jackson.”

  “How are you employed?”

  “I clean rooms at the Plaza Hotel.”

  “Is that also here in Nashville?”

  “Yes. It’s downtown.”

  “Were you working on Friday, the eleventh of December last year, Ms. Ortero?”

  “I was.”

  “Did anything unusual happen that morning?”

  “I found a dead body.”

  Frye paused a few seconds for dramatic effect and scanned the jury. It was a bush-league ploy as far as I was concerned. Everybody in the room—pretty much everybody in the country—knew a murder trial was going on.

  “In which room did you find this body?” Frye said.

  “It was in room 3100, the Vanderbilt Suite. It’s on the thirty-first floor, one of the nicest rooms in the hotel.”

  “And what time was it?”

  “Around nine in the morning.”

  “Were you alone?”

  “Elena Rodriguez was with me. We clean the suite together.”

  “Where exactly was the body located, Ms. Ortero?”

  “She was on the bed in the master bedroom, lying on her back.”

  “So it was a woman?”

  “Yes, well, a girl, really.”

  “About how old?”

  “She looked young. Like a teenager. She was very beautiful. I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out later she was eighteen years old.”

  I didn’t object, although the statement was hearsay. It didn’t matter. The jury had already heard she was eighteen during the State’s opening statement, and they’d hear it a bunch more before the trial was over.

  “What was she wearing?” Frye asked.

  “A full-length, black dress.”

  “A formal dress?”

  “I believe so. It looked like something you’d wear to a party if you were rich.”

  “Rich? Why do you say rich?”

  “Because it looked expensive, and she was wearing a necklace that looked like it was made of expensive jewels, and there was a diamond bracelet on her wrist.”

  “Did you recognize this young woman?”

  “No. I’d never seen her before.”

  “Did you notice any blood in the room?”

  “There was blood on her lips. Not much, but some, and there were some scratches on her neck.”

  “Can you describe the position of the body on the bed for the jury, please?”

  “Well, like I said, she was on her back, but she was lying across the bed about midway. Her feet were hanging off the side closest to the door, and her arms were spread straight out, palms up.”

  “Like Christ on the cross?”

  “Objection,” I said as I stood.

  “Sustained. Knock it off, Mr. Frye,” the judge said. Then he looked at the jury and said, “Ignore the reference to the Crucifixion.”

  Frye picked a photograph up off the tab
le in front of him, held it up, and waved it. More drama.

  “I’d like to show this photo to the witness and have her identify it,” he said to the judge.

  “Pass it to the bailiff.”

  A uniformed bailiff came off the wall to my right, took the photo from Frye’s hand, and walked it to the witness stand. He handed it to Maria Ortero.

  “Ms. Ortero,” Frye said, “does the photo the bailiff just handed you accurately depict the position of the body the morning you walked into room 3100 at the Plaza Hotel at approximately nine o’clock on December eleventh of last year?”

  She stared at the photo for a few seconds and looked up. “Yes.”

  “The State moves to admit the photo as Exhibit One,” Frye said to the judge.

  The judge looked at me. “Any objection, Mr. Dillard?”

  “No, sir,” I said. An objection would have been useless. It was certainly relevant, and it wasn’t particularly inflammatory, unlike so many other death-scene photos I’d seen in the past. She almost looked serene. No real harm in showing it to the jury.

  “So admitted,” the judge said. “Show it to the jury.”

  The bailiff walked over to the jury box and handed the photo to the juror that occupied the far left chair in the first row of the jury box. We waited while the jury passed the photo from person to person.

  Frye turned back to the witness. “What did you do after you discovered the body?”

  “I…I didn’t know what to do at first,” Ms. Ortero said. “I moved closer and said, ‘Miss? Miss?’ That’s when I noticed her coloring. Her face was pale, almost white. I called to Elena and she came right in. We both stood there looking at her for a little bit—I’m not sure how long—and then Elena said, ‘She isn’t breathing.’ I thought about trying CPR on her, but the hotel discourages us from doing that kind of thing. I stepped over closer to the bed and reached down and touched her forehead, and she was cold, so very cold. Elena and I walked out of the room then, and I used my cell phone to call my supervisor.”

  Frye paused to let all of that sink into the jury’s collective consciousness, and then he said, “Is there anything else you can think of that might help the jury, Ms. Ortero? Anything you may have seen or otherwise noticed?”

  Maria Ortero shook her head.

  “You have to answer,” the judge said. “We can’t record you shaking your head.”

  “No, nothing else,” she said. “I thought it was just going to be another day at work. And now…well, now I’m here.”

  “That’s all I have, Your Honor,” Frye said, and he sat down.

  I stood and walked to the lectern that was stationed directly between the defense table and the prosecution table. I smiled at the witness, but she was already shifting in the chair. She was nervous.

  “How long have you worked for the hotel, Ms. Ortero?” I asked.

  “A little over nine years.”

  “And how many days a week do you work?”

  “Five, sometimes six.”

  “Always the same shift?”

  “Yes. I work days.”

  “What time do you start and leave?”

  “I get there at five in the morning and usually leave around two in the afternoon.”

  “Where do you enter the hotel, ma’am? Do you come through the front door of the hotel like the other customers, or is there an employee entrance?”

  I heard Pennington Frye’s chair slide. “Objection,” he said. “I fail to see the relevance of this line of questioning.”

  “This is a murder trial, Your Honor, and it’s cross-examination. I’m entitled to a little latitude.”

  “Objection is overruled. Continue, Mr. Dillard.”

  “Which entrance do you use when you come to work, Ms. Ortero?” I said.

  “All the employees are supposed to use the service entrance.”

  “And where is the service entrance located?” I nodded to Charlie, who was sitting at the defense table with me. Charlie punched a few keys on her laptop, and a large architectural rendering of the building came up on an oversized monitor behind the judge as well as on half a dozen other monitors that had been placed around the courtroom for the trial.

  “It’s at the southwest corner of the building, near the kitchen,” Ms. Ortero said.

  Charlie clicked a mouse and a small area of the rendering lit up.

  “Is that it?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is there any security there?”

  Ms. Ortero shook her head, prompting another rebuke from Judge Graves.

  “No. No security.”

  “The employees don’t have to go through any scanners, nobody checks their identification at the door, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Is the service entrance door locked? Do you need a key or a card to get in?”

  “No. No key or card. We just walk in.”

  “Are there security cameras at the entrance?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “So pretty much anyone can come in through that door, anytime, without being challenged or photographed?”

  “Objection!” Frye said. “Calls for speculation.”

  “Sustained,” the judge said.

  “Thank you, Ms. Ortero, that’s all I have.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Dr. Joseph Pemberton was an expert in forensic pathology. I’d talked to Pemberton three times leading up to the trial and would have stipulated to his expertise in the field, but Pennington Frye was dying to impress the jury, so I sat there and continued to refine some points I wanted to make later in the trial while Frye droned on and on about Pemberton’s qualifications. When he was finally finished and the judge had inevitably declared Dr. Pemberton to be an expert in his field, Frye finally got down to asking some pertinent questions.

  “Dr. Pemberton, were you called on to perform an autopsy on the body of one Kasey Marie Cartwright back in December of last year?” Frye asked.

  “I was.”

  “Would you outline the procedure and your findings for the jury, please?”

  Pemberton began describing in great detail the incisions he made in Kasey Cartwright’s skull and body, how her brain and tongue and internal organs were removed, examined, and weighed, and how tissue and blood samples were gathered and stored for testing that would be performed later. He said Kasey Cartwright hadn’t had any alcohol to drink, and her drug screen was negative.

  “There were contusions, some bruising, on the upper and lower lips about an inch to the left of the center line,” he said, “with the center line being just beneath the center of the nose. The bruising is consistent with someone striking the victim with either an open hand or fist, most likely an open hand. The upper lip also had a small cut in it—about two centimeters in length—that appeared to have been caused when the lip was compressed between the victim’s teeth and the attacker’s hand. I found two small pieces of skin, one wedged between the lateral incisor and the bicuspid in the upper teeth and another wedged between the bicuspid and the first premolar in the lower teeth. Both pieces of skin were removed and stored separately for later analysis and identification.”

  “Ultimately, Dr. Pemberton,” Frye said, “what were your findings as to the cause of this young lady’s death?”

  “She died from asphyxia due to manual strangulation,” he said. “In layman’s terms, she was throttled, or choked to death. Both her larynx and her hyoid bone had been fractured, and there was heavy bruising in the muscles of her neck. There were some finger-pad contusions visible on the neck, and there were scratch marks on the neck made by Miss Cartwright’s fingernails.”

  “She scratched herself?” Frye asked.

  “It’s fairly common in manual strangulation cases,” Pemberton said. “The victim reaches up to try to pull the attacker’s hands from her throat, and she winds up scratching herself.”

  Pemberton also testified that the time of death was sometime between two and three in the morning, which wa
s testimony I couldn’t really challenge. So after a few more perfunctory questions from Frye, it was my turn. I stood at the lectern several feet from Dr. Pemberton. He was a studious-looking man, with serious gray eyes behind dark-framed glasses. He appeared to be around fifty, with short, salt-and-pepper hair, and wore a brown, tweed jacket. During my conversations with him leading up to the trial, I’d found him to be quite in awe of himself.

  “Dr. Pemberton, just so the jury is clear on this point, you have absolutely no idea how Kasey Cartwright died, do you? And by that I mean you have no idea who killed her. You simply don’t know, do you?”

  The last thing an expert witness, and particularly a doctor, wants to hear from a defense lawyer is that he really doesn’t know anything. Pemberton straightened in the witness chair, leaned forward toward the microphone, and said, “I know she was killed by another person and that she was strangled to death.”

  “But you have no idea who strangled her or why, do you?”

  “I have my suspicions.”

  “Okay, you want to fence a little. Fine. You weren’t there, were you? You weren’t in the room that night?”

  “Of course I wasn’t.”

  “So you don’t have any idea what happened, do you?”

  “Like I said, I know an eighteen-year-old girl was strangled.”

  “Again, you don’t know who strangled her, do you?”

  “I know one of those small pieces of skin that was wedged between her teeth belonged to her, and the other belonged to your client, which means he struck her. It isn’t much of a leap to conclude that he also choked her.”

  Bam! There it was for all the world, and the jury, to hear. The tiny piece of skin that was wedged between two of her lower teeth came from my client’s right hand. It had already come up in the opening statements, and I knew it was going to come up later in the trial, most likely through the TBI criminalist or one of the detectives, but I wanted to start a fight so the jury would recognize early on that Paul Milius was being represented by someone who wasn’t afraid of a fight. I hadn’t been sure Pemberton would blurt it out the way he had, but I’d certainly hoped with a certain amount of goading that he would, and I’d been successful. Now that he’d done it, it was time for me to move on to the pissing match with the judge and the prosecutor. I needed to establish some turf and to let the jury know that despite what they had been brought up to believe about defendants’ constitutional rights, despite the constant rhetoric about criminal defendants’ rights being far, far too broad and courts too lenient, the fight in criminal court wasn’t always a fair one. The media had already tried and convicted Paul Milius. The state had indicted him, and the state employed almost everyone in the courtroom, including the judge. I needed the jury to know that the judge and the prosecutor were willing to break their own rules, and that I wouldn’t let them get away with it. I was sure the judge and the prosecutor thought I had committed a serious error by letting a little exchange with Pemberton blow up in my face, but one of the things I wanted to determine was whether the judge would do the right thing and rebuke the witness. He didn’t, of course.